This website uses cookies to improve user experience, to provide analytical data to better serve our visitors, and to serve advertising to fund our operations. By using our website you consent to all cookies in accordance with our Privacy & Cookie Policy.

Your preference will be saved for 90 days, or until you clear your browser cookies.

Tag: Modular

Most drones come in a fixed form, and are pretty inflexible. The Airblock is a modular drone that encourages experimentation. It’s easy to assemble and disassemble and can be programmed like a robot. You can make the drone the way that you want.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the snazziest TVs boasted HDR and 8K resolution screens. But perhaps the coolest ones at the show won’t ever go on sale. Made by Samsung, these two concept TVs consist of borderless displays that can split into smaller displays.

Last year, Razer unveiled Project Christine, its concept for a user-friendly PC that has USB-style plug-and-play modules. Now Acer has unveiled the Revo Build M1-601, a more modest take on a modular PC.
The Revo Build works a lot like Lenovo’s ThinkPad Stack peripherals, except this one has a mini PC as a base unit.

The past couple of years we’ve seen single board computers separated into modules to make them more accessible to newbie makers, especially children. Microduino knows there’s no better way to get kids interested than with LEGOs, so it came up with the mCookie.

Last year we saw Local Motors’ Strati, a compact car with a 3D printed body, seats, windshield and support structures. Divergent Microfactories’ (DM) Blade prototype supercar looks much better – and is apparently much more powerful – than the Strati, but DM’s pride and joy is what’s inside the car.

Architectural models are usually made of wood, paper and foam. But the recently launched Arckit makes building scale models a lot easier and cheaper. Arckit consists of 1:48 plastic modular pieces. It’s a lot like LEGO, but instead of studs it uses pegs and small holes.

Bo Hacking’s Morphonauts are action figures for budding toy modders. They’re a series of action figures with components that attach to each other via magnets. For instance, you can get parts from these three Morphonauts…
…to make this new one, without using tools and without destroying any of the three.

Google’s Project Ara and similar smartphones could help us personalize our mobile device like we do our PCs, but if you’d rather stick with your smartphone of choice, the Nexpaq phone case appears to be a viable half-measure.

We’ve seen programmable electronics that use magnets or Bluetooth instead of wires and solder to connect its parts. But those kits are mainly meant for beginners, and are not as powerful or versatile as more advanced computers such as the Raspberry Pi or Arduino boards.

We’ve long been able to backup our files on external storage devices. And more recently we’ve had access to affordable cloud services that make our data omnipresent. But what if you could get the benefits of local and online storage in one system?

UberBlox Systems has designed the industrial equivalent of LEGO Mindstorms. Uberblox lets you make machines such as 3D printers, CNC mills and robots using modular parts and controllers that are based on Arduino or Raspberry Pi.

Japanese shop BreadBoardManiac has come up with a more affordable alternative to Art Lebedev’s Mini Six programmable keyboard. It’s called the Trickey, a swappable and modular keyboard. You’ll have to print or draw the keys’ legends though.

Microcontrollers and other electronics components have been getting smaller and cheaper. A company called Ynvisible proves that these parts can be made much thinner as well. The company recently launched a Kickstarter fundraiser for Printoo, a set of modular electronics that are paper-thin and flexible.

A few months ago we checked out an iPhone case that had several add-ons with different functions. The Pivothead SMART glasses have a very similar feature. The glasses have two microUSB ports – one at the end of each temple – from which you can attach small accessories called Smart Mods.